Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Flight of the iPhone

It took me several days before I realized I had such nice comments on my last post! Why, you might wonder? Afterall, one of my last posts (I won't call it 'recent') extolled the virtues of my iPhone. Why did my iPhone not alert me to the presence of my happy readers stopping by, you might wonder? The story goes like this:

It was a dark and stormy morning...ok, it was actually sunlit and beautiful, but that's not exactly the setting one would expect for such a horrible event. General Disarray and I were rushing around, running late for Baby Mayhem's doctor's appointment. (Running late is one of my least favorite things in the world. It makes me stressy and distracted and liable to do stupid things that I would never do if I had a quarter of my brain focused on the task at hand.) Since Baby Mayhem is not overly fond of her car seat, getting her in and safely strapped down requires some freedom of movement. So, as General Disarray finished grabbing things from the house, I put my purse on top of the car, strapped the glowering baby into her seat, grabbed the strap of my purse and yanked. Somehow, this motion slingshotted my iPhone out of the purse; arcing through the air it landed face down on the cement floor of our garage.

When things go really wrong for Baby Mayhem, her face goes through three distinct phases.

Phase 1: Shock. As in, did that really just happen?!

Phase 2: Uncertainty. I think this was bad, but how bad was it really? Let me ponder this a moment. (This phase is always accompanied by a mouth that looks exactly like an upside down U)

Phase 3: Certainty. Yes, I have pondered what just happened and I have come to the inescapable conclusion that this was indeed as bad as I thought it was. Screaming inconsolably is the only logical reaction.

As I picked up my iPhone and processed this:

Not actually my iPhone, but a fair facsimile thereof!

General Disarray says my face exactly mirrored the 3 stages of unhappy Baby Mayhem. Since we were running late, General Disarray quickly bundled my sobbing ass into the car and off we went with me cradling my poor iPhone. Given all the abuse it has taken (baby hands, baby licking, baby throw up, being sat on, being thrown), I had come to believe the thing was indestructible. Turns out it is only almost indestructible. Amazingly, after slingshotting through the air horizontally 4-5 feet and dropping vertically by 6 feet, the damn thing still worked! However, using it for any period of time kinda felt like looking at the world through a pair of glasses with a prescription that is close to yours but not quite perfect.

So what does one do other than sob uncontrollably? Apple is more than happy to put in new glass for you for a mere $250, but General Disarray (knowing that life would never be happy again in the Chaotic Disarray household until the iPhone was whole again) found an awesome company: Mission Repair. They do it for about half the price (which also includes their awesome overnight shipping system - they overnight you a shipping box for your iPhone, you drop off your precious at FedEx, Mission Repair fixes it and ships it back to you). If, unlike us, you didn't wait until Friday to send your iPhone in, the whole thing (from ordering on line to getting your unblemished precious back) takes about 3-4 days.

So there you have it. What have I learned from this? 1) The iPhone is not (completely) indestructible, 2) my happiness is disturbingly tied to an inanimate object, 3) my baby's unhappiness response is apparently genetic, and 4) General Disarray is awesome (I already knew that but it never hurts to be reminded).

I always try to jump in during the period of indecision with my little one to try to sway the outcome. I am rarely succesful. Also, I can't remember how I lived before the iPhone. I'm sure that it is impossible now. Hang in there!